


de veritate

by thedevilchicken



Category: Knightfall (TV 2017)
Genre: Backstory, Canon-Typical Violence, Extremely brief mention of past m/m ship, Gen, Original Character(s), Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-24
Updated: 2020-04-24
Packaged: 2021-03-02 00:22:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,315
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23825998
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/pseuds/thedevilchicken
Summary: After the death of King Philip, Talus plans to leave Paris. He has a choice to make about where he goes next: east or west. Both will lead him to his past, and perhaps to a new future.
Relationships: Talus & Original Female Character
Comments: 1
Kudos: 4
Collections: Gen Freeform Exchange2020





	de veritate

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Aurae](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aurae/gifts).



He didn't leave Paris for four months after Philip and his fuckery went off. Not because he felt attached to the place - it was a godforsaken cesspit that he wouldn't have been sad to see burn - but he had no coin to buy a horse. Maybe the Templars had been all but erased from existence, but that didn't make him a thief any more than it made him a heretic. And by the Lord in Heaven, he wasn't walking wherever he decided to go; he'd done enough walking after Acre to last three lifetimes, let alone one, so to the fiery pits of hell with that. 

There were people in the city who were still notionally loyal to the Templars for one reason or another, but he wouldn't have trusted them as far as Landry's little bawling daughter could've thrown them, never mind throwing them himself. He had to admit that some of them he might have enjoyed throwing, though, or stabbing for the bastard traitors they evidently were. Not that he enjoyed stabbing in general, though he'd always shown a talent for it. So, 'loyalty' be damned, he took up as a boarder with a widow and her daughter, in a house she'd been left that she couldn't quite afford the keeping of. At least not on her own: not without Talus and three other men as disinclined to conversation as he was himself. He settled in and set about digging himself out of yet another pile of shit. 

The widow was as brusque a woman as Talus had ever met, but he didn't need friendly conversation with his landlady or a happy homely feeling to the place he slept in. The daughter, though, was eight or nine years old and the inquisitive sort who'd ask you questions all night long while she brought your stew and refreshed your wine. Talus knew he'd have to be careful as soon as he set eyes on her, and he'd've told her mother she should be careful with her, too, at least if she knew what was good for her. Some other men might not take kindly to her interrogations. And King Louis might not have been his whoreson father, but that didn't mean he'd welcome stray Templars in his capital with open arms. He had an air of mystery to maintain. At least more than the girl's mother's pissy, pissant moneylenders had. He resented that they woke him in the night more than once just in the first week he was there. 

"What's your name?" the girl asked on the night he arrived, as he sat down at the table. She brought a cup of wine and he stared at it on the tabletop as he wondered two things: what in all he hells he was meant to say to her, and whether it was permissible to drink wine without his brothers' company. Given he had no brothers left, or at least as near none left as damn it, he picked up the cup and drank.

"Richart," he said. "And who are you, girl?"

She smiled. "Ameline," she replied. "Are you a knight?"

She pointed at his sword, still wrapped up tight in a cloak, which he'd rested up against the edge of the table. As it happened, there were two swords in cloak-tied-with-rags parcel: one was his own and the other had, until recently, belonged to one of the ex-king's ex-guards. In the street that day, it had seemed a lot like the man wouldn't be needing it - at least not outside the Kingdom of Heaven - and Talus' knew his own was conspicuously Templarly in aspect. If he found himself in need of a sword, and he had no doubt that he would, he wanted to at the very least seem less conspicuous than that. 

"Do I look like a knight, girl?" he asked her, and she looked at him, and she frowned at him, and she scrunched her mouth in thought like only children ever seem to. 

"Not really," she said. "But I think maybe stranger things have happened." 

And he laughed, because he couldn't say that she was wrong. She seemed pleased enough with that as she skipped off from the table, and he was pleased he hadn't told a lie. 

In his room, after he'd eaten, he teased up a couple of the floorboards with a knife that he'd been keeping tucked into his boot and he hid his trusty old sword underneath them where prying eyes and roaming children wouldn't find it. In went his mail, too, wrapped up in his white Templar tabard with its red cross that had been coming unstitched at the bottom right hand corner for as long as he could recall. He supposed it didn't matter very much if his sewing didn't honour the glory of God when he was dressed more like a shepherd than a knight. 

The room itself didn't offer much more luxury than his cell back at the Temple in Chartres had. He'd lived with that for who knew how long before and after Acre, though, and while he'd been away from home, well, they hadn't been days of convenience and comfort. He still had the scars underneath his clothes to prove that point, not that he took the clothes off to go to bed. He stretched out on the mattress, boots on the floor but still clothed besides that to guard against the bitter fucking cold, and he thought about what he'd told the girl. The best defence against youthful inquisition was an armour of half-truth, he thought. He'd long thought that, as Initiate Master; when they'd questioned him, he'd told them just enough and nothing more and let them draw their own conclusions. The conclusions they'd drawn had been quite something, every now and then.

 _Do I look like a knight?_ wasn't a lie. _Richart_ wasn't a lie, either. It had just been a good, long time since anyone had called him that. 

His name hadn't always been Talus, of course. It had never been uncommon for brothers to take a new name when they took their vows, so he knew he'd never been uncommon in that respect himself. Some men brought their old names with them and some were given a new one when they got there, to honour a saint or because some other brother shared their given name or just to say a cheerful _bugger off_ to the burden of the past their old name carried with it. Talus' past had never struck him as much of a burden, not the way some others' had, but it did obscure his past. 

He'd been born _Richart de Moras_ , third son of a minor noble in a small town not too far outside Chartres, and frankly it hadn't been a bad life while he'd had it. He'd grown up riding a horse and training with a sword and visiting the village church or Chartres cathedral whenever he was told to, and knowing all the while that his father would have sold him to the devil if Lucifer had only paid enough to fix the roof of their west tower. Lucifer didn't pay well, however; all he gave the baron was an eldest son with a penchant for gambling, a middle son with a penchant for drink, and a youngest son who he liked better than the others but who nobody of any coin would marry. The youngest wouldn't inherit, so options had been rather limited.

He lay in bed that night and thought back a bit. Frankly, of all the things he could've spent his time remembering, home in the tumbledown chateau was far from the worst of it; the prize there went to ten years a fucking prisoner in Acre, as if irons and tongs and any of that shit had the power to turn him from God. Maybe they soured him a bit. Maybe they made him harder on the initiates, but then again they'd needed it - the new ones hadn't had the Holy Land to make them strong. But he thought back to the time before that life, when his brothers drank and his father swore and _Richart de Moras_ went out under the cover of dark and fucked the stablehand behind the storehouse. His father couldn't have given a toss where his dick went as long as he married well in spite of it. Perhaps he'd never wanted to, but he'd have done it. Even then, duty had meant something. 

Then he killed a man who came calling for his brother's debt, and that was that: he'd go find himself a cloister or else he'd likely hang. He fucked off on a crusade instead and joined the Templars on the way. He had regrets, but the fact he didn't go find the life of a tonsured monk wasn't one of them; he's not sure, only as sure as he can be of anything that's not God and the sword in his hand, but he thinks it might have been God's will that touched him. It made him a better brother to the Templars than he'd been to his own kin. And it seemed the Almighty had never intended him for the marriage bed after all.

The next night, when the girl asked him her questions while her mother raised her voice to the men outside, he said he was a fighter - not like you'd find in the proper shithole taverns sometimes but the sort jewellers might take to market to make sure brigands wouldn't steal their wares. He supposed it was one way to talk about keeping pilgrims safe on the way east to Jerusalem, so technically the truth. And the following day, he made a perfect truth of it: he found himself work doing exactly that. 

"Have you killed anyone?" she asked the next night. 

He nodded at her over his wine. "I have," he replied. 

"How many?"

He shrugged. "Never counted," he said, which was also the truth. He'd always told himself the men he killed he left to God, and so they didn't stain his conscience. 

"Do you like what you do?" she asked the next night. 

He shrugged. He drank his wine and then wiped what he'd spilled from his beard. 

"It's a job," he replied. "We all have to work."

"Does the Bible tell us that, or is that just what you think?" 

He clucked his tongue. He sent her away to refill his cup. 

"Have you ever been outside Paris?" she asked the next night. 

"I have," he replied. 

"Where'd you go to?"

So he told her, "Acre." She'd no idea where that was. 

They didn't have a map, so he drew one in the dirt outside, which had the unexpected side-effect of driving off the moneylenders' pesterers; they were at it, still, though he'd paid more than his fair share for room and board to do his bit to help. He showed the girl the route from Paris out of France, then across the world to the shores of the Holy Land, or at least as best he remembered it. He'd never been much of a navigator, and he'd never made the whole journey alone. 

Night after night, she asked him questions. Night after night, he answered them. He answered for months, with stories and with maps in dirt, with letters drawn in wine on the tabletop that she didn't understand at first, but began to learn to. He answered nightly, until it was his time to go. He'd bought a horse - a bitter old nag, but a horse nonetheless, shod and saddled and ready for a long, ponderous arse of a walk if not a gallop. He'd leave in the morning, he thought, or else the morning. Not more than a week at the most.

"Will you come back?" Ameline asked, as he had his last meal at the boarding house table, by the low fire he knew they couldn't quite afford to keep.

After so many truths, he couldn't lie. He told her, "I don't think so, no."

And then, when the moneylenders' thugs came to take what they were owed that night, the girl's mother met them with a knife; they met her with swords and left her bleeding from the gut. Talus fetched his sword from underneath the floorboards, and he tracked down every one of them. It didn't take long, and he couldn't say it wasn't bloody, but no bloodier than what they'd done to Ameline's surly mother. That was his sign to go, he thought; he washed the blood from his hands, washed the blood from his sword, and then, at dawn, he saddled his horse. 

He left the open fucking sewer that was Paris and wished the Seine would rise up like a flood to take it. And outside the city walls he asked himself: where will I go? West would take him to the place where he was born, so he could see if Lucifer had ever put a roof on the west tower. East would take him miles and miles, toward the rising sun and Acre, where he'd once thought his life would end. 

"Where do you want to go, girl?" he asked. 

"Can we see where God was born?" she answered. 

"You might change your mind before we get there," he replied. 

"I like the way they write their letters," she said. "Can you teach me?" 

He didn't say yes, but didn't tell her no - Initiate Master once again, he thought, then he helped her up onto the horse. By God's will, he'd been too late to save her mother, but hers was a soul he could save.

In spite of all his plans, he fucking walked. And perhaps he couldn't say he didn't mind it, but he knew God would grant him patience; he always had before.


End file.
